To manage large software projects with many developers and a large code base, it’s very useful to automate builds and test runs through continuous integration. The most common setup is to have a continuous integration server build your source code and run all your tests on code check-in. This gives you almost immediate feedback on whether or not your latest code check-in broke the build by either causing a compiler error or test failure. There are several alternatives out there for continuous integration. I have chosen to integrate ExpressUnit with Hudson which is an open source continuous integration platform. The nice thing about Hudson is that it’s very easy to configure. The interface is extremely user friendly and lets you handle everything through a simple web based UI. I won’t go into much detail on how to set up Hudson as there are plenty of good tutorials available on the web. Instead I will list some of the necessary steps to integrate ExpressUnit with Hudson
1)Add your source code management tool through the Hudson web UI
2) Set up MsBuild as your source code builder (point to your solution file)
3) In the Windows batch command window make a call to “ExpressUnitGui.exe runtests” which triggers ExpressUnit to run and close after all tests have been run (No user interaction required)
4)Select to publish JUnit test result report. ExpressUnit will, when running in command line mode, generate an xml file with test results which will be picked up by Hudson and displayed in the UI. The generated xml file is compliant with the JUnit test result format required by Hudson, so Hudson will be able to display information about your test runs. You will be able to see statistics of test runs over time as well as information about why particular tests failed.
I am actually using ExpressUnit as my testing framework while building ExpressUnit. The following screen shot shows my ExpressUnit project on Hudson
Figure1
On the left you can see the build history, and over on the right is the test trend graphed over time.
Please drop me a line if you need more detailed instructions on how to get ExpressUnit up and running with Hudson
Tags: ExpressUnit, Hudson
